More and more, computer users (people who use a computer or computing device) are using email as a significant channel of communication. Further, computer users often subscribe and/or are admitted to various email groups to receive emails distributed to the email group members for a variety of reasons including personal interest, business purposes, familial communications, and the like. Often, a computer user will create one or more rules regarding the receipt of emails received via a group distribution. These rules may include associating priorities for emails for certain groups, sorting and moving the various emails into folders corresponding to a particular group, and the like.
For the computer user that joins an email group, it is often surprising the number of emails that he/she will receive due to membership in the email group. Quite often, the volume of email associated with an email group feels more like “spam” than valuable information. Unfortunately, reading and sorting through all of the email associated with a group, determining which item of email requires action and which is simply informative (or worse), requires a substantial investment of individual time and resource. For example, quite often a computer user will wish to further investigate a matter if he/she is specifically identified in an email, rather than referentially identified due to membership in an email group. If the computer user is identified in the “To:” or “CC:” or “BCC:” lists, the computer user may be more motivated to read and respond to an email, assuming that the sender specifically identified the computer user to receive (and act upon) the email.
For those computer users that are part of one or more email groups that are computer/email savvy, it is up to them to configure email rules to move, organize and classify received emails distributed according to a group distribution into appropriate folders. However, not all computer users are familiar enough with their email system to define rules to help organize the flow of email, especially email associated with a defined email group. For these, whenever an email is sent to a group that email appears in the personal Inbox of a group member, along with other emails. Further still, while individually configured email mail rules go some way in addressing organizational issues, in this circumstance the onus is on the users rather than the email server.
In addition to forcing each user to create and/or configure rules for managing group emails (if desired), when an email is received that identifies a group as a recipient, the email is distributed to (and therefore duplicated) every group member's email inbox. This duplication to all members of a group translates to wasted disk space at the server and lost processing bandwidth from duplicating the file to the various group members.
Further still, group membership is often dynamic. Indeed, it is unreasonable to assume that a group's membership will not grow: i.e., add new members. Currently, when a member joins an email group, the new user's “membership” in a group is only effective from the date on which that user joins the group: i.e., the new group member cannot refer those emails sent to the group prior to his/her joining the group. The work-arounds are cumbersome: an earlier joined (or original) member of the group could forward any important previously-sent emails, or the new member can try to peruse emails to examine the thread leading up to the email to obtain the required information (such as background, etc.)